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ABSTRACT
Drawing on the mindshaping view of social cognition, Haslanger makes a compelling case that understanding the depth of human enculturation is critical for remedying social injustice: specifically, for understanding the resilience of practices of injustice, as well as developing better strategies for resisting and rectifying them. In these comments, I focus on: (1) reviewing key features of the enculturation hypothesis that support Haslanger’s insights; (2) highlighting three observations she makes regarding our cultural practices that should encourage and guide theorists/ activists in working towards justice-engendering social reform; and (3) emphasizing, in particular, Haslanger’s endorsement of securing protected spaces in which heterodox cultural practices that potentially challenge unjust orthodox practices can themselves develop and thrive. I close by raising three questions for further discussion that together stress a complementary theme for promoting social justice: the importance of enculturating conversational practices that can reach across ideological divides.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For a now classic contemporary defense of this alternative nativistic view, see Tooby and Cosmides [Citation1992].
2 These include non-instrumental imitation, explicit pedagogy, unconscious behavioural conformity, norm sensitivity and a readiness to engage in norm enforcement [Gergely and Csibra Citation2005; Sterelny Citation2012; Zawidzki Citation2013].
3 Notably, harsher words are ‘male’ words; softer ones ‘female’. Hence, Japanese encodes particular gender stereotypes into these linguistic norms. Of course, gendered language patterns are evident in many (perhaps all?) languages, whether formally policed or not – though to what extent such gendered speech encodes gender stereotypes is an open question (for further discussion, see: Corbett [Citation2015]; Dunn [Citation2015]).
4 Significantly, as these researchers note, this particular stereotype is also racialized—explaining, in their view, the under-representation of some races versus others in these disciplines as well (e.g., African-American vs. Asian-Americans).
5 The standard debate continues over the extent to which this supposed capacity is (a) modular; and (b) genetically pre-wired.
6 It is sometimes suggested that interpreting others would be computationally intractable without mindshaping, given the potential complexity of our mental lives [Zawidzki Citation2013: 6]; see also Haslangar [Citation2020: 8–9]. Against this, I suggest (more radically and in keeping with Geertz) that we would never have developed such complex mental lives without mindshaping (see too, McGeer and Pettit [Citation2002]).
7 Consider, for instance, the hodgepodge of legal rights and responsibilities accorded to individuals in LGBTQ relationships in the US, prior to the June 2016 Supreme Court decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges establishing full marriage equality for same-sex couples in all 50 states.
8 By ‘protected’ I here simply mean, policed by members themselves, whether in formal or informal ways.
9 A summary version of this story is nicely presented by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic Monthly ((March 27, 2015), from which the Davis quotations in this paragraph are taken Davis recounts his own story in an interview podcast entitled The Silver Dollar on Love+Radio: http://loveandradio.org/2014/02/the-silver-dollar/
10 For a nice example of one such case, listen to Eleanor Gordon-Smith on This American Life recount her conversation with a committed ‘cat-caller’ in the King’s Cross area of Sydney, Australia: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/603/once-more-with-feeling.
11 Perhaps, and hopefully, the ‘black lives matter’ movement has created a similar tipping point.
12 Witness, for instance, the incredulity and backlash inflicted on Anita Hill in regard to her testimony before the US Senate on the behaviour of Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings to the US Supreme Court. Other examples of this sort of backlash abound.
13 Citing Rich [Citation1980] and Butler [Citation1990], Haslanger rightly cautions that some experiences—for instance, some forms of lesbian desire—are in fact unwittingly distorted by such over-reliance on available conceptual resources (here, involving heterosexual desire) to make them intelligible [Haslanger Citation2020: 17]. Still, as a strategic move that enables progress—say, toward marriage equality—it may have much to recommend it. And the knock-on benefits of this should not be underestimated. For it may well be that once such relationships are generally acknowledged and accepted, their characteristic differences will have an impact on the space of possibilities explored in heterosexual relationships themselves, thereby normalizing an expansion of possibilities for human intimate relationships in general.
14 See, too, Mackenzie [Citation2018] for a compelling argument on the importance of subjecting our ‘responsibility practices’ to vigilant normative critique along the same lines.
15 As Haslanger [Citation2020: 21n28] says herself:
In this, I agree with Thomas Kuhn’s [Citation1970: 145] idea of what is required to change paradigm: ‘In science, the testing situation never consists … simply in the comparison of a single paradigm with nature. Instead testing occurs as part of the competition between two rival paradigms for the allegiance of the scientific community.’